Academia

Grade inflation at American universities is out of control. The statistics speak for themselves. In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was estimated at 2.6 out of 4. By 2003, it had risen to 3.4. Today, it stands at 3.8.

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All of this contributes to the strikingly poor record of American colleges in actually educating their students. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa showed in their 2011 book “Academically Adrift,” the time that the average full-time college student spent studying dropped by half in the five decades after 1960, falling to about a dozen hours a week. A clear majority of college students “showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing,” with about half failing to make any improvements at all in their first two years of higher education.

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In one of the oldest jokes about the Soviet Union, a worker says “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” To an uncomfortable degree, American universities now work in a similar fashion: Students pretend to do their work, and academics pretend to grade them. It’s high time for a radical reboot of a broken system.

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But grades don’t just have an important signaling function to the outside world; they are, first and foremost, meant to give students a clear sense of how they’re doing. When excellent, good and poor students get very similar grades, it is hard for students to know whether they are doing excellent, good or poor work.

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By the same logic, grade inflation also punishes students for uneven performance over time. If you are a middling student with few major life challenges and strong mental health, you will wind up with a high GPA. If you are a brilliant student who really struggles during one term because of a family crisis or some mental health problem, your GPA will tank, never to recover. The current grading system favors mediocre kids from stable homes over talented ones from less stable backgrounds.

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The best solution would be to take the simple, if somewhat brutal, step of ending grade inflation. But if that is not in the cards, then it’s time for universities to admit that the emperor has no clothes. The second best option may be to put an end to the whole charade: Universities could make all of their courses pass-fail.

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Lawmakers want to ban legacy admissions at California private colleges, even though few colleges admit students that way. Bill backers say the bill will signal to students that college is for them in the aftermath of the national ban on affirmative action.

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If Gov. Gavin Newsom signs the bill passed Wednesday, the state would join four others that also made legacy preferences in admissions illegal for either public or private institutions. With California’s outsized national role — it’s the most populous state and enrolls the most college students — bill backers say this legislation will serve as a necessary corrective to last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned all but military colleges from using race as a factor in admissions.

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In fall 2022, only seven private universities out of about 90 in California admitted students whose family members either donated money to the school or attended the school themselves. A little over 3,300 undergraduates — out of an admissions class of 31,633 — were legacy admissions. Last fall, it was six colleges and about 2,100 students admitted with legacy or donor ties as a factor.

At one school, Northeastern University Oakland, fewer than 10 students were admitted who didn’t meet the school’s admissions criteria last fall. The other campuses — Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College, Santa Clara University, Stanford University, University of Southern California — admitted students with legacy or donor ties who all met admissions standards.

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As it stands, the bill’s only punishment for colleges would be to appear on a list compiled by the state’s Department of Justice. However, Ryan said her organization is part of a coalition of groups that includes legal defense funds “that stand ready to take legal action if in fact campuses do not comply with the law.”

In a milestone breakthrough, more than half of Caltech’s incoming undergraduate class this fall will be women for the first time in its 133-year history. The class of 113 women and 109 men comes 50 years after Caltech graduated its first class of undergraduate women, who were admitted in 1970.

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Caltech isn’t the first educational institution to reach gender parity in STEM. Harvey Mudd College, a small private institution in Claremont, was an early leader in diversity — a key goal of former President Maria Klawe, a computer scientist and mathematician who stepped down last year after a 17-year tenure. The college enrolled more women than men in 2010 for the first time in its history and in 2014 graduated more women than men in engineering. Today, women make up 52.8% of majors in computer science, 50.5% in engineering and 68.2% in mathematical and computational biology.

At UC Berkeley, another powerful producer of STEM graduates, nearly half of students majoring in those fields identify as women or nonbinary, but the field they enter varies significantly. They make up more than two-thirds of students in biological and biomedical sciences, but about one-third in engineering, computer and informational sciences, and mathematics and statistics.

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But even as more women study science, technology, engineering and math, they remain significantly underrepresented in the related workforce. Women hold about 45% of STEM degrees but make up only 28% of the workforce in those fields, said Blackwell of the American Assn. of University Women. Many women face unwelcoming “masculine cultures,” she said, and some experience gender discrimination and opt to leave the field.

Robin DiAngelo alleged to have copied parts of doctoral thesis from Asian-American scholars.

The bestselling author of a book about “white fragility” has been accused of plagiarising sections of the work of two Asian-Americans in her doctoral thesis.

Robin DiAngelo, an anti-racism consultant who argues that racial divisions have been entrenched by “defensive” white people, committed 20 cases of plagiarism, according to a complaint filed with her alma mater, the University of Washington.

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Her thesis allegedly lifts two paragraphs from Thomas Nakayama, an Asian-American professor with Northeastern University, and his co-author, Robert Krizek, without attribution, The Washington Free Beacon reported.

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Her “Whiteness in Racial Dialogue” dissertation is also reported to have lifted material from Stacey Lee, an Asian-American professor of education, summarising the work of a third scholar.

Community college is often touted as an affordable start for students who want to earn bachelor’s degrees. Yet only 13% of community college students actually go on to earn degrees from four-year institutions within eight years, according to data released by the U.S. Department of Education in 2023

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With their open enrollment policies and low tuition, community colleges offer crucial access to higher education. They educate 41% of all U.S. undergraduates, according to the Community College Research Center. And when those students enroll, 83% plan to transfer to four-year schools, according to the Center for Community College Student Engagement.

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Two-thirds of community college students take classes part time. And they often juggle jobs, caregiving and other obligations that can disrupt their education.

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Research suggests statewide policies to make transferring easier can help students earn bachelor's degrees and avoid taking unnecessary classes.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s incoming class of 2028 saw a precipitous drop off in the percentage of Black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander students, the university announced on Wednesday. It is the university’s first undergraduate class to be admitted since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year banning affirmative action.

For the incoming class of 2028, about 16 percent of students are Black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander, compared to a baseline of about 25 percent of undergraduate students in recent years, the announcement said.

The comparison to the class of 2027 was even more dramatic. The percentage of Black students enrolled dropped to 5 percent from 15 percent, and the percentage of Hispanic and Latino students dropped to 11 percent from 16 percent. White students made up 37 percent of the new class, compared to 38 percent last year.

The percentage of Asian American students in the class rose to 47 percent from 40 percent. The Supreme Court’s decision was based in part on a lawsuit against Harvard, which claimed that the university had discriminated against Asian American applicants, holding them to a higher academic standard than other racial or ethnic groups.

“The class is, as always, outstanding across multiple dimensions,” Sally Kornbluth, president of M.I.T., said in the announcement, adding, “What it does not bring, as a consequence of last year’s Supreme Court decision, is the same degree of broad racial and ethnic diversity that the M.I.T. community has worked together to achieve over the past several decades.”

M.I.T. is the first highly selective university to release statistics on the composition of its freshman class since the high court’s ruling.

As for his teaching job, matters have only gotten worse. He said that he’s lost trust in his students. Generative AI has “pretty much ruined the integrity of online classes,” which are increasingly common as schools such as ASU attempt to scale up access. No matter how small the assignments, many students will complete them using ChatGPT. “Students would submit ChatGPT responses even to prompts like ‘Introduce yourself to the class in 500 words or fewer,’” he said.

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But giving up doesn’t seem to be an option either. If college professors seem obsessed with student fraud, that’s because it’s widespread. This was true even before ChatGPT arrived: Historically, studies estimate that more than half of all high-school and college students have cheated in some way.

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Even last year, one survey found, more than half of K-12 teachers were using ChatGPT for course and lesson planning. Another one, conducted just six months ago, found that more than 70 percent of the higher-ed instructors who regularly use generative AI were employing it to give grades or feedback to student work.

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In the most farcical version of this arrangement, students would be incentivized to generate assignments with AI, to which teachers would then respond with AI-generated comments.

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University President Minouche Shafik resigned from her post on Wednesday, she wrote in an email to the Columbia community. The announcement comes only weeks before the beginning of the 2024-25 academic year and marks the end of a tumultuous year in the position.

During her time as president, Shafik faced fierce national scrutiny for her administration’s handling of pro-Palestinian student protests, academic freedom, and on-campus antisemitism. She is the third Ivy League president to resign from the position in relation to campus tensions over the war in Gaza following University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill and Harvard University’s Claudine Gay.

Changes by the tests' maker in recent years have shifted scores upward. That has led to hundreds of thousands of additional students getting what's considered a passing score -- 3 or above on the 1-to-5 scale -- on exams in popular courses including AP U.S. History and AP U.S. Government.

The nonprofit behind the tests, College Board, says it updated the scoring by replacing its panel of experts with a large-scale data analysis to better reflect the skills students learn in the courses. Some skeptical teachers, test-prep companies and college administrators see the recent changes as another form of grade inflation, and a way to boost the organization's business by making AP courses seem more attractive.

"It is hard to argue with the premise of AP, that students who are talented and academically accomplished can get a head start on college," said Jon Boeckenstedt, the vice provost of enrollment at Oregon State University. "But I think it's a business move." The number of students cheering their higher AP scores could rise again next year. The College Board said it is still recalibrating several other subjects, including its most popular course, AP English Language, which attracts more than half a million test takers.